Network design for quantifying urban CO<sub>2</sub> emissions: assessing trade-offs between precision and network density
Abstract
The majority of anthropogenic CO2 emissions are attributable to urban areas. While the emissions from urban electricity generation often occur in locations remote from consumption, many of the other emissions occur within the city limits. Evaluating the effectiveness of strategies for controlling these emissions depends on our ability to observe urban CO2 emissions and attribute them to specific activities. Cost-effective strategies for doing so have yet to be described. Here we characterize the ability of a prototype measurement network, modeled after the Berkeley Atmospheric CO2 Observation Network (BEACO2N) in California's Bay Area, in combination with an inverse model based on the coupled Weather Research and Forecasting/Stochastic Time-Inverted Lagrangian Transport (WRF-STILT) to improve our understanding of urban emissions. The pseudo-measurement network includes 34 sites at roughly 2 km spacing covering an area of roughly 400 km2. The model uses an hourly 1 × 1 km2 emission inventory and 1 × 1 km2 meteorological calculations. We perform an ensemble of Bayesian atmospheric inversions to sample the combined effects of uncertainties of the pseudo-measurements and the model. We vary the estimates of the combined uncertainty of the pseudo-observations and model over a range of 20 to 0.005 ppm and vary the number of sites from 1 to 34. We use these inversions tomore »
- Authors:
- Publication Date:
- Research Org.:
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Org.:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR); National Science Foundation (NSF); Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) (United States)
- OSTI Identifier:
- 1330588
- Alternate Identifier(s):
- OSTI ID: 1411643
- Grant/Contract Number:
- AC02-05CH11231; 1035050; 2013.145
- Resource Type:
- Published Article
- Journal Name:
- Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (Online)
- Additional Journal Information:
- Journal Name: Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (Online) Journal Volume: 16 Journal Issue: 21; Journal ID: ISSN 1680-7324
- Publisher:
- Copernicus Publications, EGU
- Country of Publication:
- Germany
- Language:
- English
- Subject:
- 54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
Citation Formats
Turner, Alexander J., Shusterman, Alexis A., McDonald, Brian C., Teige, Virginia, Harley, Robert A., and Cohen, Ronald C. Network design for quantifying urban CO<sub>2</sub> emissions: assessing trade-offs between precision and network density. Germany: N. p., 2016.
Web. doi:10.5194/acp-16-13465-2016.
Turner, Alexander J., Shusterman, Alexis A., McDonald, Brian C., Teige, Virginia, Harley, Robert A., & Cohen, Ronald C. Network design for quantifying urban CO<sub>2</sub> emissions: assessing trade-offs between precision and network density. Germany. https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-16-13465-2016
Turner, Alexander J., Shusterman, Alexis A., McDonald, Brian C., Teige, Virginia, Harley, Robert A., and Cohen, Ronald C. Tue .
"Network design for quantifying urban CO<sub>2</sub> emissions: assessing trade-offs between precision and network density". Germany. https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-16-13465-2016.
@article{osti_1330588,
title = {Network design for quantifying urban CO<sub>2</sub> emissions: assessing trade-offs between precision and network density},
author = {Turner, Alexander J. and Shusterman, Alexis A. and McDonald, Brian C. and Teige, Virginia and Harley, Robert A. and Cohen, Ronald C.},
abstractNote = {The majority of anthropogenic CO2 emissions are attributable to urban areas. While the emissions from urban electricity generation often occur in locations remote from consumption, many of the other emissions occur within the city limits. Evaluating the effectiveness of strategies for controlling these emissions depends on our ability to observe urban CO2 emissions and attribute them to specific activities. Cost-effective strategies for doing so have yet to be described. Here we characterize the ability of a prototype measurement network, modeled after the Berkeley Atmospheric CO2 Observation Network (BEACO2N) in California's Bay Area, in combination with an inverse model based on the coupled Weather Research and Forecasting/Stochastic Time-Inverted Lagrangian Transport (WRF-STILT) to improve our understanding of urban emissions. The pseudo-measurement network includes 34 sites at roughly 2 km spacing covering an area of roughly 400 km2. The model uses an hourly 1 × 1 km2 emission inventory and 1 × 1 km2 meteorological calculations. We perform an ensemble of Bayesian atmospheric inversions to sample the combined effects of uncertainties of the pseudo-measurements and the model. We vary the estimates of the combined uncertainty of the pseudo-observations and model over a range of 20 to 0.005 ppm and vary the number of sites from 1 to 34. We use these inversions to develop statistical models that estimate the efficacy of the combined model–observing system in reducing uncertainty in CO2 emissions. We examine uncertainty in estimated CO2 fluxes on the urban scale, as well as for sources embedded within the city such as a line source (e.g., a highway) or a point source (e.g., emissions from the stacks of small industrial facilities). Using our inversion framework, we find that a dense network with moderate precision is the preferred setup for estimating area, line, and point sources from a combined uncertainty and cost perspective. The dense network considered here (modeled after the BEACO2N network with an assumed mismatch error of 1 ppm at an hourly temporal resolution) could estimate weekly CO2 emissions from an urban region with less than 5 % error, given our characterization of the combined observation and model uncertainty.},
doi = {10.5194/acp-16-13465-2016},
journal = {Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (Online)},
number = 21,
volume = 16,
place = {Germany},
year = {Tue Nov 01 00:00:00 EDT 2016},
month = {Tue Nov 01 00:00:00 EDT 2016}
}
https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-16-13465-2016
Web of Science
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